Apple Was Granted a Patent for a System that Tracks ‘Stalkers’ and ‘Spammers’

Recently, Apple has been granted a patent for a social network system that has a various number of database-level characteristics to guarantee trustworthy “friend status”, or the manner that users communicate between each other. In other words, Apple’s U.S Patent should not be confused with a full-fledged social network; the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office certified Apple for an extremely efficient method of managing data in a social network service.

Apple provided a system that can ensure consistency between friend records in a highly-scalable database. The main idea in Apple’s invention is related to the fact that the purposes of the social networks is to connect people. When it comes to the way of connecting, Apple states that the initial relationship status between two users is “none”, followed by the second one, called “handshake”, that appears when a contact is initiated and, of course, the third one, which is the “friend state”.

Friend of Foe? The Apple System Helps Users Recognize Them

One majorly powerful feature of this system created by Apple is related to stalking and spamming. The Apple system can describe a stalker count and also a spammer following the friend requests sent, or the number of friend requests denials received by a user.

If the user that sends the friend requests, touches a pre-defined stalker count point, all the following attempts will begin to be ignored. In addition to this, when the system blocks the request, it might also send an ignore flag, in the name of the recipient.

In order to control the organization of the databases, there is a write-ahead log generator which is used to track “transactions” like accepting a friend request, removing a friend or merging two handles on an account, among others user actions.

The system is also able to fetch and reject friend requests, to obtain a list of friends, to defriend and send friend requests, as well as it has all the basic networking tools.

This Apple System is particularly useful as it can be engaged in an API which people will be able to utilize with a great number of mobile applications. By making it accessible via API, Apple offers a powerful tool and a massive help in losing unwanted connection attempts.

Apple does not seem to desire its own social networking product. The company appears to believe that the best way to make the iOS platform social is through the third party services integration.

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